SEISMIC RESPONSE OF DIFFERENT TYPOLOGIES OF TANKS IN CHEMICAL PLANTS AND IMPACT ON HUMAN HEALTH

Industrial chemical plants are nowadays both a strategic site and a serious threat to human lives in case of natural disasters such as seismic events. Within industrial chemical plants, tanks represent one of the most dangerous elements due to the high volume of potentially hazardous substances. Moreover, the location of those is usually defined according to economic or logistic choices that do not consider the site hazard and the proximity to cities and villages. Although also other non-structural and structural elements present in the industrial plants could have a considerable vulnerability, within the present study, the research has been focused on the seismic behaviour of steel tanks. The steel tanks could have different structural seismic behaviour depending on the typology (i.e. slenderness, presence of legs, etc.) and the installation of innovative devices such as seismic isolators. In this work, a set of fragility curves defined for different tank typologies are reported. In case of a seismic event, the damage or the collapse of steel storage tanks may cause the release of toxic substances, impacting the health of workers and citizens living close to the plant. In the present work, the authors discuss the developed and the application of a novel integrated methodological framework to quantitatively assess the impact on human health due to the release of hazardous substances from chemical industries, estimating levels and time course of environmental contamination, human exposure profiles and health effects that may result from exposure to hazardous chemicals.